Damnatio Memoriae
by Sair1
Summary: "...Therefore must the soul deceive, despise, and murder men." Snape botches an assassination, Lucius plays dirty, Black gets even more framed, and Lupin proves once again that he's the only one with a clue.
1. dm:one:potmos:herr doktor, herr enemy.

I haven't written anything this long in years, so here goes the grand experiment. What started as a horrifically incongruous mental picture has blown up into a crazylong plot machine. That's right, time to pass the blame--Marilyn Manson, U2 and Neil Gaiman made me do it. 

My goal is to finish two chapters per month. 

Rated R for coarse language and graphic violence. Begins in the summer preceding the fifth year. Standard disclaimer. Something witty. The end.  
  
  
  
damnatio memoriae : one  
  
  
Saturday, August twenty-ninth: the first light was weak with a promise of heat. Morning rose around the castle on the rock, glass flashing in the sun as windows exhaled the night, pushing their shadows a little deeper into the center of the thing. Severus Snape had been awake now for nearly ninety hours. 

His hands were shaking and the knife tapped out a nervous cadence over wood and boarsheart. It drew blood on his index finger; he cursed and stuck it in his mouth, tasting copper as he made the final, even slice. His good hand fluttered over the table, gathering work and waste alike, all tucked into a pocket at his hip. Snape crossed the room and counted--one-two-three-four-five--pieces into a cauldron on the fire. 

Each splashed and vanished. He stared for a long moment at the contents of the kettle, as clear as still water. A log shifted and the fire sighed sparks, yet the cauldron remained complacent. It would not boil. 

But he was seeing past it, or perhaps not really seeing much at all, as something like fear blunted by four days' waking ebbed inside him. Snape turned as if to move, his eyes fixed to a singular point somewhere in the stones behind the fire. 

Then he moved abruptly to the podium facing the empty classroom, and pulled a small television from one of its shelves. 

This was placed on one of the long tables, between the weathered blue stains of a fourth year's final gone awry and a small capital A nicked into the wood; Professor Snape assumed a position opposite the screen with a look of intense concentration. The room was quiet save for the settling of the fire, so when he pulled the two silver antennae into a slightly crooked V, the sound was clearly audible: a frantic gulping, like a man short on air. The television rocked to the sound, absurdly round for a moment as it ballooned around the edges. Static crackled across the glass. 

"--on the West Bank, where Palestinian forces continue to violate Tuesday's cease-fire accord." 

The picture was dim. She was standing knee deep in sand and rubble, but her hair was perfectly styled. There was a red logo in the corner lined in white: CNN. 

"Too far," he muttered, his hands guiding the antennae into a tighter form; to the left. A drop of blood rolled down the metal line, mercury bright in the morning sunlight. 

"--in Jacksonville yesterday, where as many as twelve are wounded and three are dead after a man drove his SUV into the window of a local supermarket--" 

She stood knee deep in oranges and rubble, but her hair was perfectly styled. The reception was clearing. It was blonde. 

"Wrong side of the pond, my dear," he said laconically, slapping the flank of the set. The image made a startled jump, bouncing offscreen. Skittish. Snape bit his lip, deftly bowing one antenna at an obtuse angle. 

"--as the tourism industry encounters more gloomy numbers in London. But up next is the weather, and at ten to the hour: new information evidence linking an escaped madman to the Chapel Street incident, and why law enforcement officials are saying he has taken his first victims in decades." 

She stood in front of Westminster Abbey in the rain. A plastic bag covered her hair. Water was collecting around her ankles as she paused; there was a silence of rain and fire in which he felt acutely aware of the cold. Chapel Street. The water eddied around her stockings, but her words were sinking in. She had touched a breach, a place he had broken in the Muggle code, and the associations that spilled out were immediate. Fourteen years ago, Chapel Street had meant a man's ruin. His stomach made a fitful noise. Cut--commercials. 

Absently, he found a chair, wooden legs skipping over rough flagstones as he pushed himself to a comfortable distance. His own legs were thrown over the table, ankles crossed, bare toes thoughtlessly twisting the severed cables trailing from the television's bowels. But his eyes had that queer unfocused look again. 

Maybe he was overestimating his own capabilities. Maybe he was trying to talk himself out of it. Maybe--he needed a nap. Ninety hours was a long time to live in any single task. 

The weather. Snape's attention waned, drifting to the cauldron; barring that he failed to keep the fire red and healthy, his business here was essentially done. There would be time to sleep and eat and scheme, time to live, perhaps, in the end, but first he had to see this thing through properly. 

He thought blithely: there would be time to muster a honest fear of death, too. 

"Authorities and the public alike have long suspected Chapel Street incident may have been deliberate, rather than accidental." She was sitting behind a desk, looking Snape in the eye. Her hair was dry. "Fourteen years ago, thirteen lives were claimed and four were injured when a gas line allegedly ruptured on a busy weekday morning." 

The footage was tagged file. In afterthought, he wasn't sure what he had expected; certainly not the view from some anonymous alley where yellow tape crossed the passage onto the street, casting slick glares in the afternoon sun. Red and white lights ran tight circles over blown out windows, hands and backs of men in uniform. Cornelius Fudge stood recognizable and unmoving. The minister's acid green bowler had faded. 

This was the frightening sort of objectivity about Muggle film: his imagination had failed to account for the street sign, bent at the bolt and singed black. 

"--have long questioned the validity of the official ruling that the incident was accidental. Now, startling new evidence has emerged that places an escaped murderer at Chapel Street minutes before the explosion." 

A still photograph, hours earlier rendered in crisp black and white. The half-turned face haloed in red should have come as little surprise--he needed no indication. Chapel Street read straight on its steel pole. 

"Black," he breathed through a mirthless sort of smile. 

"According to the Associated Press, the photo came from an undisclosed source. The man has been identified as Sirius Black, who escaped from private institutionalization two years ago. Black is now wanted for questioning concerning his involvement with the incident." She turned to face a different camera, shuffling a stack of papers importantly. They all appeared to be blank. "However, police were given a more urgent reason to intensify their manhunt last Thursday, when the bodies of a young mother and her seven year-old twins were discovered in the suburbs outside of London." 

Guilt chose a rather odd moment to make itself manifest. A summer could be spent following the Muggle misinterpretation of a dark lord's growing boldness, a fortnight might be spent in the active preparation to kill a man--yet he felt cornered in the simple act of eavesdropping. Fingers clenched, testing the burden of information. The thought was most atypical of him: Not Black. Not now. 

He regretted it immediately. 

"Although authorities believe releasing too much information may jeopardize their investigation, top law enforcement officials are now saying this murder may be related to several dozen unsolved cases from the past three decades. Police have set up a hotline, and are offering a ten thousand pound reward for tips leading to Black's arrest--" 

"What unsolved cases?" he wondered aloud, but the question surely a fluke. His mouth had gone dry. Several dozen was not a round number. And yet the underlying doubt was even further removed--why Black? Why now? 

She had stopped speaking, looking at him levelly again. 

"This murder may be related to several dozen unsolved cases," she repeated carefully. Closed captioning sprang up from the base of the screen, reiterating her sentence in yellow type. Her smile was wooden and perfectly aligned. It said, look how legitimate our concern is for you...then there was the hint of sex behind it. 

"Woman, I am not slow, nor am I deaf, so kindly stop leering like a bitch in heat and tell me in plain English how Black is responsible for your unsolved cases." Ninety hours had seen the better of him; Snape was losing his patience, and rapidly so. 

"Sirius Black is wanted for questioning concerning his involvement in the Chapel Street Incident. Sirius Black escaped from private institutionalization two years ago." The image flickered to a grainy photo of Black at twenty, laughing. "Would you like an infographic for the murder rate in the United Kingdom?" she offered brightly, eyes lifted high, because Snape was standing, because Snape's heel was on the corner of the set and he was thinking darkly that some men probably found her pretty from that vantage point. 

Then he gave a gracious kick. 

The television hit his own desk before bouncing end over end across mortar and stone, guttering plumes of circuitry and cracked plastic. Glass burst from a nest of tangled wire, lit like a sparkler and crackling from point to point. It was a crash site that circled his feet, and the mute reflection swimming over the resting pieces was a slim figure standing among palm trees knee-deep in mud. 

He was breathing. He was very conscious of this fact. But it was outside the pitch and tumble of his breath that he had heard it. He blinked, turning slowly. 

"Severus." Remus Lupin stood framed by the door. Inclined his head slightly, his fingers curling around the oak frame. He wore a tee-shirt that bade visit the extraterrestrial highway--with exclamation points--and that shit-eating smirk they all found so charming. 

"Remus." Snape belatedly withdrew his leg from kicking position. He swallowed forcefully, feeling his throat seize on air and slide down. "Defense Against the Dark Arts, I presume?" 

Lupin just nodded again. The blue-dark smudges under his eyes did not preclude him from looking healthier overall, and Snape found himself facing the inevitable quandary: he simply couldn't dislike Remus Lupin as a person. Fortunately, he had no qualms with basing his acrimony on principle. 

Then there was the resentment. And a whole lot of that. 

"Who are you planning on killing?" Lupin was casually blunt. Either an educated guess or a snarky bit of intuition had led him there; at least he had the good sense not to gape at the spilled interior of the television. 

"Yes, well, congratulations--your name is now being looked upon with favor by the committee," he said, drawing his cloak closer, fists balled in the trim and pulling the black wool tight over his arms and shoulders. Snape's grin was less shit-eating than it was outright predatory. 

"Good to see you too, Severus," he replied good-naturedly. "So you're really not going to tell me what you're up to?" 

Neutrality prevented Lupin from entering the classroom, neutrality circumvented annoying questions, and Snape assumed neutrality was what kept that bemused smile on his face. That was the thing about Lupin's expression--one might sense the character of his mind but not the specifics. 

"Of course not." He brokered there would be no argument. 

Lupin studied him for a long moment. Brown eyes tracked left to right, quite literal in their reading. 

"Very well, then. I'll be around," he said finally. With two fingers forming a half-assed salute, he made as if to leave, but suddenly he stopped short, gazing steadily at the other man. 

"Oh, and Severus? Get some sleep. You look like shit." 

And then he was gone, echoes receding down the corridor. Earnest, irritating Lupin, wrapping unwarranted concern in offense. Realization stirred and moved after him--it occurred to him too late that Lupin, in all probability, had no concept of the trouble stalking Black. 

But minutes later, Snape passed out. He hit the ground cold; a shard of glass sank into the sole of his foot, broadcasting in silence as blood welled around the edges and, over time, the floating pictures faded.   
  
  


dm:one:end. 


	2. dm:two (part one):olethros:o lord thou p...

damnatio memoriae : two  
  
  
Students' curiosity did not supersede self-preservation, so commentary was limited to whispers of speculation that seemed to chase the hem of his robes: Professor Snape was walking with a noticeable limp. In a school with no secrets, the truth was slightly less profane. He had pried the two-inch fragment of his former television screen out of his foot with a penknife, and bled for forty-five minutes. 

In a school with no secrets, he knew when to hold his tongue. He also knew when to bite it so deeply that his dogteeth came away tipped in red. 

It caught him late on Thursday afternoon, in those warm hours before dusk when the sun touched the deep end of the school and laid strong lines across the stone. The light softened where their paths dragged holes through the smoke; that day the air in room two hundred smelled of burnt hair and confederate jasmine as the last bell drained the room of footsteps, failures and rumors. And so it came to be that the Professor was nursing his favorite grudge against human reproduction in a fit of waspish muttering as he mopped up a puddle of something that was not gilding potion but something that hissed like hot oil when the summoning came out of the great above like God's own wrath and _brought him to his knees_. 

And after, he would remember breathing smoke that also smelled of smoldering cotton and think himself fortunate. 

If there was a degree of indignity to sinking into dust and ground, he ignored it because he was seeing in turns of white. He panted; he might be confusing clutching with covering one's arm. Under his palm familiar lines lit with a feverish heat, searing their image into his sleeve--a morbid relic, this personal Turin--and he knew the Dark Mark had surfaced in melting black. 

Voldemort's invitations came in no uncertain terms, although Snape had a suspicion that His Darkness' propensity for the dramatic overrode his common sense. Wizards had pissed themselves at the sight of a fresh Mark, but the truth of the matter was that summoning had a nasty history of bodily injuring the summoned. Years ago, Malfoy suffered a concussion when an inopportune call to duty arrived as he was spurring his horse into a canter. And Caracalla St. France--one of the most inept of their numbers, despite the promise of his name--had nearly drowned in a Scottish pay-toilet when a summoning knocked him unconscious while taking a leak. 

So it was with great relief and only mild chagrin that Snape found himself safely crouched under the thick underside of the long work table like an atomic-age elementary student awaiting the end of the world. Little hitches and gasps loosened into deeper breaths. And then, quite unexpected unto himself, he fell back, dust and robe parting under his weight like the Red Sea. The smoke was thinner down here. Sunlight cut him down the center, drawing a corner at his waist; one eye laid in shadow. But his right hand did not relax, and the tendons quivered under skin. He was going to murder a man tonight. 

And yet, if someone happened to walk into his classroom at that moment, if someone predisposed to asking the right questions were to eclipse all that sun drifting through smoke--he would have no answer. It was most unlike him to not know why. 

He would be a hero, or in the very least, a martyr. Neither was terribly appealing. Nor was the notion that his actions might be regarded as goodwill towards his fellow man. There should be no mistake: Severus Snape misliked his fellow man. He was apathetic, misanthropic, in no capacity selfless, and wished sincerely that there was money to be had in the endeavor, as greed was much easily understandable than vague concepts of restitution. It would simply be an unfortunate byproduct of his success that a great many people would be a great deal happier. His ideas of success, for the time being, were slightly more utilitarian. Living through the night, for one. 

The afternoon was waning. 

Professor Snape stood up, shaking the ashes from his hair. If one knew his office very well, one might discover an unlocked cabinet; a goblet that had gone missing from the kitchens seventeen years ago had indeed, gone missing. No one knew about the small silver ring with even smaller square ruby. He left the door open and no letter of his intents. And if one happened to look up, if one knew all the right places, one might see a figure on a broom streaking over the Forbidden Forest, foot dangling gingerly against the darkening sky as if testing the water. 

His nature was not that of an optimist. Merely--a procrastinator. 

--- 

If nothing else, it could never be said that Voldemort lacked a sense of humor. 

To say he came out of thin air would be misleading; that night the air was heavy with fog and the sky's cotton white belly hung low on the asphalt, smelling of rain and intuition. Marginally more accurate would be to say he came out of nothing, he came out of one of the nameless soft places between Apparations, and his robes carried gently on the wake of his arrival. Disapparation always struck him as a deus ex machina of minor descent. 

His free hand dipped into a pocket, fingers coiling around the wand. Snape conjured on one breath: the mask formed on a lacing armature of spell and afterglow, casting his eyes into shadow but in the end--the smooth color all things turn when left in the sun. His mind was not on ornamentals, nor the consequences of his actions--not that it was possible to foresee a deep place off the coast of California, a whale's gravity slipping through a mayday flare of bubbles, or open eyes silvering with sunlight as the tide carried her home, where the sand would not hide her missing pelvis. Magic made them all thieves, though very few wizards were familiar with the concept of finite matter. 

Physics agreed with Professor Snape, but even he could not induce magic to violate its most sacred laws. He ducked under the hood a Death Eater proper, and the movement of wool was a sound like the Pacific breaking from very far away. The sea was salt-sharp in his nostrils. And then everything faded behind the low, flickering whine of neon, 24 HOURS OPEN. 

His breath condensed, rolled away. He stood alone on the border of an empty parking lot, breeze drifting with the hush, hush of distant traffic. The contents of the goblet trembled against the pocks and dents of hammered iron. Snape felt steel in himself crack, trickling a kind of cold into his belly that was not apprehension--but he did not move, either. 

Perhaps they were charmed to recognize his robes or his reticence, perhaps his weight shifted in such a fundamental manner that the dull Muggle gears and motors finally took notice of his presence. The glass doors retracted, hissing on their automatic tracks. Florescent light rushed to the tips of his boots; doubts simultaneously blossomed and fell away like withered petals. It would seem he preferred the relative dark to regard the corpse in his path. 

However, he was admittedly ill-prepared for the corpse to reciprocate the interest. 

It was face down on the printed linoleum, all odd angles, undisturbed gray hair and not a single viable cause of death save its radical departure from proper human skeletal structure. Snape had arrived at the rationalization that it was like a throw rug with bones, really, when just as suddenly it was sitting upright. The dead man with 'Walt' and several smiling yellow buttons pinned to his blue apron was grinning magnanimously. His eyes spun listlessly in their sockets. 

Snape's reaction was young in a system of old defenses, the sum of thousands of small internal retreats met by obstinacy--he swayed but did not recoil. Steadied by a most characteristic sneer, he thought: and this is only a parlor trick, considering the company. 

"Fashionably late is it, Professor?" Recently Dead Walt said in a pinched voice remarkably similar to Lucius Malfoy's. His index finger grazed the corner of one eye, the next attempt buried it to hilt in his nose. Somewhere a clot tore and thin, oily fluid ran down his lips and chin unnoticed. 

"My apologies. I paused to kill a few sick orphans on my way over," he replied dryly, nudging Walt's body with one toe, but refraining from an otherwise pressing urge to poke it with his wand. 

"And let me be the first to remark that we've regretted the absence of your sparkling wit." At this, Recently Dead Walt made an awkward commiserating bow, finger still firmly rooted in the nether passages of one airway. One nostril ripped free of its mooring. "Now stop mooning about the goddamn Muggle corpse and get to the back of this place before He fancies subjecting you to wildly archaic forms of punishment." 

Lucius spoke with the sullen disinterest of one examining the whites of his nails, the absurdity of his threat lost in the distance between them. A grimace added weight to the professor's frown, choosing to linger briefly in inhospitable conditions. Indifference was safer. 

"...Only if you promise there will be drawing and quartering." It was the most appropriate nonchalance he might offer, Caesar at the Rubicon, casting his die between the living, dead, and remote. Recently Dead Walt's eyes came 'round in concert, soured around the iris, but inside--a shallow-water blue, seeing enough for both men. 

"And refreshments!" Recently Dead Walt amended cheerily before the line was cut and he imploded with little fanfare, an old man sinking boneslessly into his own pressed slacks and clean linoleum flooring. With a little further toe prodding he was lying on his back, arms stretched at his sides, arranged in ecstasy but utterly devoid of insight. 

He sighed softly. 

Snape crossed the corpse at the door, robes flaring across the empty aisles, clothes and toys and electronics falling behind a trailing corona of black and an increasingly agitated stride. Of all the Dark Lords, of all the megalomaniac assholes in the world, he had to be playing turncoat with the kind of sociopath who thought it cheeky to hold his staff meeting in Wal-Mart's lawn and garden department. 

He slipped the ring on his middle finger. He was familiar with its American significance. 

--- 

"Welcome, old friend." 

Severus Snape looked at the assembled Death Eaters, looked at the dappled glass of the patio table; the heels resting in the center and the man whose queer red eyes went unmitigated by mask or hood. He bowed formally. 

"My Lord." 

Voldemort observed that fear and love smell nothing alike, actually. 

--- 

The poison ring was an institution of the court, a product of the age of alchemy, a weapon of high intrigue and little practical use; it appealed to Snape for many of the same reasons. Silver acanthus leaves were the setting for a wine colored stone of French vintage, their curling metalwork concealing a small hinge, the delicate parody of a locket. Like everything in clan Snape, it came with a rather dubious pedigree: the lady's petticoats were scattered across the snowbank, her warmth steaming gently through the eyelets when his forefather nicked it. She was bereft of her head and in little position to argue. Hemlock had filled the tiny box, then. 

He tipped his hand, thumb snapping the lid back. Palm up, he offered, he poisoned. The powder fell without odor or disturbance. 

Across the table, Voldemort raised an eyebrow. His hands were arranged in sharp peaks, nose resting on the tips of his forefingers. Death Eaters sat in green striped lawn chairs, two to a quaint cast iron bistro set--here, stiff discomfort to be easily mistaken for disdain--or stood flanking his shoulders. St. France wore a ridiculous sequined Mardi Gras mask. 

They were all killers. He had no pretentious of originality. 

"Alchemist's Reagent, Master." The goblet's base provided punctuation, closing the statement as it touched the glass, bouncing slick reflections--a tremor in his jaw. Albus Dumbledore was reputed to carry a vial of the potion on his person at all times, and Snape judged that any of the Dark Lord's misgivings about his own infidelity would be readily compromised by simple human greed. Pride goeth before the fall, et al; his retribution was formed of a predilection for classical tragedies. 

...But retribution was a hardening word, motivations were failing as he withdrew hands that had lately become untrustworthy into his sleeves. He saw Malfoy behind a mask of ivory, and the carefully drilled hollows were an abstraction of Persian interests. Brightly dyed feathers brushed St. France's chin. 

Snape's eyes widened just a little--dark into dark. 

He would kill because he knew no other way to live, and no quicker way to die. 

"...My absences are inexcusable, but I trust my Lord's generosity might permit him to accept a humble reparation?" he said when Voldemort did not reach for the cup, no, in fact, this was quite the opposite of reaching, leaning back so deeply the forelegs of the chair came free of earth. Snape found himself remembering a cobra's vertical strike is directly proportionate to how tall it has drawn itself from dirt, remembering how easy it seemed to charm a coiled snake. Voldemort was favoring him with a terse smile. He said: 

"Victors declare reparations, Severus. Now sit down." 

He did. A Crabbe--or perhaps it was a Goyle?--surrendered a quarter of a beach recliner. His foot began to throb again, lancing pains that traced his inseam from heel to knee. But logic was detached and ticking along amiably through none of his own interference, counting implications by words, reducing organic matters to quantifiers all and none. 

Voldemort rocked forward, landing on his feet in a counter-surge of robes. He watched as the Dark Lord's palms came down hard on the table, every Death Eater shaken to rigid silence in the chattering aftermath of glass against metal ribbing. And abruptly, the flickering trails of variables and constants went dull. 

Some claimed Artistotle's fallacy was that he assumed his variables existed. His error was more fundamental: magic had never been rational. 

"Since Professor Snape has deigned to grace us with his presence," Voldemort intoned, the soft clay lines of his profile impassive, "I believe celebrations are in order. Wormtail?" 

A small figure at Voldemort's side murmured acquiescence. Snape absently noted the man was a splintered collection of movements, distinct from one moment to the next and uneven in cooperation. But any recognition stalled when the man abruptly dropped from sight; Snape was on the verge of declaring imminent death a wholly unconvincing distraction when a spinning something arced, and fell out of air. 

One hand caught the can. He blinked stupidly. The aluminum fairly shimmered with condensation, a tentative finger drawing away wet from the pale printed label. Lemonade. 

It was inexplicable, really. He felt numb and fucked, but mostly just fucked. 

--- 

In the end, seventeen years of composure wasn't enough. Voldemort's knuckles tapped the Hogwarts' coat of arms, the Professor's potion idle and unrippling under the rim. He watched. Severus remembered deference too late, the convenience of a sideways glance--his expression had been surprisingly direct. Questioning and curiosity. Maybe even desperation. 

"Cheers," the Dark Lord said quietly, tipping the lip of the goblet. His face held no malice. "To old loyalties." 

He drank to that, and his face held nothing at all.   
  
  


dm:two:part one end. 


End file.
